I did. Soon, I thought, they would just leave, stumble off acrimoniously into some boozy argument at home, and fall into their pit of a bed taking oafish swipes at each other and missing. And I would have a whiskey with Murdie and then walk home alone, letting the cool night air wash the alcohol, and the stale smoke, and all the fury off my back. I still wish it had happened that way.

It didn’t. An Otis Redding song came on, the one where he keeps telling some girl that his telephone number is six-three-four-five-seven-eight-nine. I always used to wonder what happened to the people who actually had that telephone number, whether they were driven mad by hordes of drunken Otis Redding fans ringing them up in the middle of the night, or whether nobody bothered them at all.

‘If you need some good loving, just call on me …’ sang Otis, ‘And if you wa-a-a-nt some good kissing, call on me … Lord have mercy.’

I had started listening to the song, letting the words drift around me as a cocoon against the pair sitting up at the bar. But the guy at the bar had started listening to the song too, and now he was bawling out his own parodic version of the lyrics: ‘If you wa-a-a-ant, a good kicking, call on me.’

I began watching him. He was horrible all right, but he wasn’t stupid. It took a certain amount of ingenuity to fit those new words tightly into the song, especially when you were as drunk as he was. And he was singing them in exactly the same rhythm as Otis.

He had a flicker of charm in his face, too, something in the curve of that cheekbone that suggested good humour, sitting right next to his viciousness. But that flicker would always be enough to attract certain women to him, enough to assure him the place of popular class clown who beats up other pupils at break-time.

I hated him. I hate people who ruin a good song, plastering stupidity all over something great. And I hated his chanting face, pumping out its thick stream of cunning idiocy.

On and on it went. When it came to the chorus, he had another little twist up his sleeve: he began bellowing, at the top of his voice: ‘Six-three-four-five-NINE-NINE-NINE,’ the ambulance number, and banging his fist on the counter so that the pint glasses danced a rickety jig. People were moving away from him now, edgily, and Jimmy was looking over from the door to see what was going on, but the girlfriend was still screeching with laughter. I could see her distended, open mouth, the dirty pint glasses, Jimmy’s anxious face. It was like riding round and round, strapped to a fairground horse on some nightmare carousel. My head was beginning to spin.